HRC, in Mandela’s footsteps

Those of us who lived through the Clinton administration may have forgotten how acrid was the atmosphere. One of its features was the administration’s pervasive untruth. Reading Michael Isikoff’s book Uncovering Clinton, to take just one small example, one begins to understand that everyone around the Clintons, including the journalists who covered them, understood the basics of their marital arrangement, yet remained (and remains) silent about it. Who are we to judge? And the Clintons are sort of like Franklin and Eleanor, right?

The title of Isikoff’s book was a pun. Isikoff was the guy who uncovered the Lewinsky story as a reporter for Newsweek. When Newsweek sat on the story, Matt Drudge blasted it out there on the Drudge Report and undercut the regime of silence. Isikoff was credited with uncovering the scandal, and the title referred in part to his role exposing it.

Uncovering Clinton also referred in part to not covering Clinton. Iksikoff begins the book with an assessment of the knowledge of key players about Clinton’s behavior and their tacit cooperation with it. (I was subsequently told by a prominent reporter who “covered” Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign what he saw of Clinton’s way with women in front of others on the campaign trail that year.) Although the names have changed, I believe the media enablers continue their uncoverage of the Clintons to this day.

The arrangement continues, of course, along with the suffocating falsity in which it is embedded. With the coming presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, we are in for megadoses of more of the same.

PsychologiesHillary We get a preview of coming attractions in reports of an interview with Ms. Hillary for the October cover story of Psychologies magazine (I’ve never heard of it either), as reported in the British press. The Telegraph and Daily Mail headlines don’t say it all, but they say about as much as we need: “Hillary held truth and reconciliation hearing over Bill’s affair” (Telegraph) and “Hillary Clinton says Bill was subjected to South Africa-style hearings in order to work through his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky” (Daily Mail).

According to the articles, Ms. Hillary claims to have convened “South Africa-style” truth-and-reconciliation proceedings akin to those convened by Nelson Mandela to overcome the effects of the apartheid regime. Ms. Hillary explains that she was inspired by Mandela and that she had to invoke the truth-and-reconciliation process with Mr. Bill to avoid a mental “prison” for the rest of her life. Now she is free.

Who comes up with this stuff?

Lest we forget, when it served the purposes of the left, Mr. Bill was declared our first (metaphorical) black president by Toni Morrison in the New Yorker. This was before Obama became our first mixed-race president and New Yorker editor David Remnick took up the apostle’s mantle.

Ms. Hillary now casts Mr. Bill in the role of one of the masters of apartheid and herself in the role of Mandela. It’s all in a good cause, of course, as was the proclamation of Mr. Bill as our first black president, and no one is now about to disrupt the forces of history, let alone those of truth and reconciliation.

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